Covid-19 is having a huge impact on owners, occupiers and operators of Commercial Buildings with many remaining empty potentially for weeks/months. However, there are still legal requirements to ensure that key M&E systems are regularly inspected and tested to ensure they remain compliant with the law.
There remains a need to stay compliant and to ensure that Insurance companies continue to provide cover for their Buildings. Unfortunately, with pressures on Businesses to keep staff and employees happy, its easy to see why many Building/Facility Managers are blissfully unaware of the consequences when they take the view that its easier just to shut the building down.
The CIBSE (Chartered Institute of Building Services Engineers) Association has produced a nice simple document that shows the statutory requirements, which is worthwhile sending out to clients via email or by sharing a link to a social media post with a reminder. Here is a link to the document.
Some buildings remain partially open with just a handful of people occupying, whereas other will need to arrange access as they will employ contractors to physically visit these sites to carry out these inspections.
With thousands of people now working from home or prevented from travelling, many commercial buildings are moving into shutdown mode. This has huge implications for building services equipment and decisions that would normally have been planned over many months must now be taken within days.
Many of these compliant inspections can be carried out continuously using IoT technology. The Internet of Things is a great low cost quick way of Monitoring Key pieces of M&E Equipment, especially for “dumb” items that aren’t currently connected to any other system.
Key and Critical Service Businesses that are key to keeping the country moving such as Data Centres, Healthcare, Energy, Telecoms and Pharmaceuticals as well as Emergency Call Centres etc. are still seeing enquiries, receiving orders, making deliveries and fielding requests for call-outs, spare parts and technical support from industries which support everyday life for businesses and citizens.
Many M&E/FM Businesses must continue to operate during this national emergency, albeit at a reduced capacity.
Without effective cooling and monitoring of key critical items of plant in particular in Data centres and IT Server rooms, the servers which hold our Bank accounts social media conversations, medical records, TV streaming services and emails, would soon overheat and fail.”
Trained engineers play a hugely valuable role in keeping these systems operational by ensuring these data centres continue to operate at increased levels through effective cooling methods. However even the best system can fail
Small battery powered sensors can be attached quickly and easily to any item of Mechanical or Electrical equipment to monitor typically things like:
High/low air and water temperatures inc Hot/Cold Water Tanks
Gas leaks,
Water leaks,
Refrigerant gas leaks/pressures etc. and many other systems that can benefit building owners and operators.
The systems are continuously monitored. If any one of those sensors identifies anything operating outside of pre-determined parameters, it sends an immediate alert via SMS/Email to key stakeholders for them to take immediate action.
Full reports are available at any frequency
The ENVIROLOGIK IOT system has been specially developed to remotely monitor any item of Mechanical or Electrical equipment.
The custom ENVIROLOGIK Dashboards enables the contractors to schedule service visits to prevent the risk of total failure before it happens.
Maintaining the Buildings essential services
IoT does enable the technology to remotely undertake many of those statutory and compliance tasks that a physical person would have to undertake
Why not consider how IOT can monitor the status of your key systems whilst your employees are working away from the building?
A fully functioning system can be installed in a matter of a few hours with full remote monitoring and alarming.
Interested? Get in touch 0203 916 5158 or email chris@enviro-logik.co.uk
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